Phenomic AI has raised $2.25 million in funding
An AI start-up is reaping the benefits of attending the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL), which is now open for applications at Oxford Saïd.
Phenomic AI is seeking to transform the pharmaceutical industry by using AI to speed up drug discovery and is focused on developing new treatments for cancer and fibrosis.
Traditionally, this has been done through painstaking human analysis of information such as tumour biopsies. But co-founders, Oren Kraus and Sam Cooper, believe that by applying artificial intelligence they can drastically reduce the time it takes to spot signs of disease and develop new drugs. They have applied deep learning to develop computer vision tools to examine biomedical images in the minutest detail.
Oren and Sam originally met at a workshop at Harvard University in 2016. At the time, Oren was working on a PhD in Machine Learning and Computational Biology at the University of Toronto. Sam was a PhD student with the Department of Computational Medicine at Imperial College London and the Dynamical Cell Systems team at the Institute of Cancer Research.
With so much in common, they kept in touch, and when Phenomic was born in Toronto in 2017, they agreed to develop the company together as co-founders.
Entering the 2017/18 cohort of the CDL programme at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management proved to be a pivotal point for the company.
Founded in 2012, Creative Destruction Lab is a seed-stage mentoring programme for science and technology-focused start-ups. The programme matches participating companies with a carefully selected group of mentors - accomplished entrepreneurs, investors, scientists, and business professors. To date CDL has helped to nurture start-ups worth over £2 billion in equity value.
Oren and Sam spent nine months in the programme, attending five full-day, on-site sessions and achieving set objectives in between.